Marcus Garvey 1887-1940

Marcus Garvey was one of the twentieth century’s most influential leaders of black nationalism. In establishing the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Garvey hoped to build-through enterprise and mass education—a unified nation of people of African blood. A powerful orator, organizer, and writer, Garvey recruited nearly one million UNIA members worldwide. In 1919 he charted the Black Star Shipping Line (B.S.L.), which promoted black cross-continental trade. Under his red, black, and green banner of Pan-Africanism—a commitment to the solidarity of all black peoples—Garvey encouraged the worship of a black deity and the study of black history. Devoted to the separation of the black and white races, a position that he believed was vital to racial prosperity and cultural development, Garvey warned black workers to avoid the possible manipulation of white trade unions and Communist organizations. Although his success was shortlived, Garvey continues to symbolize racial pride and destiny for blacks around the world.

Born in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, in August of 1887, Garvey was the youngest of 11 children. A bright student, he acquired a passion for books at an early age.

Family financial problems led to his apprenticeship in the printing trade, where he developed journalist skills. In 1907, participation in a failed printer’s strike influenced Garvey to enter politics. Roughly four years later he joined the mass migration of Jamaicans seeking employment in Central and South America. In Costa Rica he contributed to publications that presented the oppressive conditions of black workers. While abroad, Garvey’s futile attempts to gain British colonial protection for West Indians promoted his growing racial awareness.

Returning to Jamaica in 1912, Garvey realized that the island offered little opportunity for a young black politician. Traveling to London that same year, he met with black laborers, intellectuals, and businessmen whose descriptions of the injustices suffered under European colonial rule contributed to his gradual path toward racial militancy. The most influential of these acquaintances was a Sudanese-Egyptian actor, journalist, and nationalist named Duse Mohammed Ali. Working for Ali’s publication African Times and Oriental Review exposed Garvey to the role of African business and the triumphs of Africa’s ancestral past. While in London he read Booker

Born Marcus Moziah Garvey, August 17, 1887; died from complications of a stroke, June, 1940; son of Sarah Jane Richards and Marcus Garvey, Sr.; married Amy Ashwood (playwright and lecturer), December, 1919 (divorced, 1921); married Amy Jaques (editor), July, 1922.

T. Washington’s autobiography Up From Slavery. The book’s vivid account of racial conditions in America inspired the young Jamaican to become a “race leader.”

On the voyage back to his homeland in 1914, Garvey conceived of the plan to create the UNIA and its coordinating body, the African Communities League. On August 1, with the assistance of a few colleagues, he officially launched his organization. Adopting the motto “One God! One Aim! One Destiny!,” the UNIA offered opportunity to all blacks. The organization’s plan of African redemption centered upon the establishment of black educational institutions. Following Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee model, Garvey sought to build Jamaican trade schools that would provide missionaries for “Mother Africa.” Black middle-class Jamaicans, however, remained indifferent to his vision. In need of funds and support, Garvey wrote to Washington, who in turn invited him to come to America. Tragically, Washington died in 1915, before the two could meet.

The following year Garvey arrived—at the age of 28— in New York City. Penniless and unknown, he struggled to raise support for his Jamaican educational program. At first, residents of New York City’s Harlem were unresponsive to his speeches. Garvey became aware that to gain black support in the U.S. he would have to alter his Jamaican strategy; while his previous orientation had been strictly reformist, Garvey’s outlook in America became increasingly revolutionary. He endorsed a broad economic plan for private business and industry. By the end of World War I in 1918, black migration, racial violence, and continuing segregation had provided a climate that vastly benefitted the expansion of Garveyism. The UNIA’s economic strategy and publication, Negro World, attracted thousands of new proponents. Rapid success encouraged Garvey to move his base of operations from Jamaica to New York.

On August 1, 1920, the first UNIA convention opened with a parade that stretched for miles along Lenox avenue in Harlem. That evening, before a crowd of 25,000 in Madison Square Garden, Garvey boldly announced his plan to build an African nation-state. Sympathizing with the plight of Irish Home Rule and Jewish Zionism advocates, he called upon blacks to seek their own “place in the sun.” The highlight of the week-long convention was the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World. Containing a bill of rights, the document proclaimed the equality of the black race and included resolutions for the creation of independent legal and educational systems.

Around the time of the convention, Garvey organized several business enterprises. These included the Negro Factories Corporation, a restaurant, a millinery, a publishing house, and a chain of cooperative grocery stores. But most importantly, he attempted to create a maritime fleet that he hoped would give blacks political power and bring them to the forefront of worldwide trade. Selling shares of five-dollar stock through the mail enabled him to acquire enough capital to purchase three ships for the Black Star Shipping Line. The shipping company contributed to Garvey’s growing prominence as an international champion of Pan-Africanism. Consequently, he introduced a plan to transfer his organization’s headquarters to Monrovia, Liberia.

Despite his emerging popularity, Garvey received widespread opposition among both black and white political, labor, and religious organizations. During the postwar era, a growing fear of Socialist and Communist conspiracies led many to view Garvey’s movement as a harbinger of radical black power. In 1919 Garvey was summoned by the U.S. State Department regarding the legality of the B.S.L. operation. Although the investigation failed to produce any evidence against Garvey, the State Department pursued a plan for his eventual deportation.

Harshest resistance arose among black leaders, including Socialist Labor Party spokesman A. Philip Randolph and the African Blood Brotherhood’s Cyril V. Briggs. After 1920 Garvey suffered continual attacks from the Negro publications Chicago Defender and Crisis, the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). W.E.B. DuBois, cofounder of the NAACP, was one of the leading adherents to the mounting “Garvey Must Go” campaign. Although he was a black nationalist and Pan-Africanist, DuBois rejected Garvey’s segregationist and economic policies. As a result, the two became embroiled in bitter dispute over black progress and African liberation.

In the years following the first UNIA convention, the organization began to decline. After a trip to Central America in 1921 Garvey was denied a visa by the State Department, thereby delaying his reentry into the United States for several months. A year later, federal officials convicted Garvey of mail fraud. Released on bail, he tried to rescue the failing B.S.L. from collapse. Due to the poor condition and exorbitant operating costs of the company’s vessels, however, the B.S.L. was forced into insolvency. During the same year, Garvey’s meeting with the acting Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) greatly contributed to his faltering status. His statements that the UNIA and the KKK shared a similar policy of racial separation spread outrage throughout the black community. Garvey’s demand for a unified African Orthodox church left him almost entirely alienated from conventional black religious denominations.

In 1923 the murder of former UNIA member Reverend James Eason generated further controversy. Eason’s death motivated eight of Garvey’s enemies to send an incriminating letter to Attorney General Harry Dougherty. The correspondence hastened the State Department’s decision to bring Garvey to trial. With Garvey acting as his own defense, the hearing became a forum for his racial beliefs. Unable to adequately defend against the charge of mail fraud, he was incarcerated; six months later he was released on $25,000 bail. In 1924 he attempted to establish a second commercial fleet—the Black Cross Navigation and Trading Company—but facing a shortage of funds, the business soon folded. UNIA efforts to found an independent Liberian republic also proved unsuccessful. In 1925, despite an appeal to the Supreme Court, Garvey was sent to the Atlanta penitentiary. After serving two years, federal authorities ordered his release and immediate deportation.

Upon his return to Jamaica in 1927 Garvey entered local politics. Struggling to form the People’s Political Party, he developed a program of national economic, agricultural, labor, and political reform. Although the UNIA’s 1929 convention in Kingston, Jamaica, recaptured some of the splendor and enthusiasm of its earlier Harlem era, the organization never again amassed a substantial membership. Under a new charter, Garvey returned the UNIA headquarters to Jamaica, causing widespread fragmentation and desertion among branches in the United States. In 1935, confronted with ensuing political defeat and financial problems, Garvey took up permanent residence in London. But in England his racial program and political aspirations were met with indifference. From 1936 to 1938 Garvey attended conventions in Toronto, Canada, where he set up the School of African Philosophy. After a long period of failing health, he suffered a stroke in 1940 that led to his death in June of that year.

Despite limited success in his lifetime, Garvey has become an international symbol of black freedom. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., called him “the first man, on a mass scale to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny.” During its heyday the UNIA claimed as members Black Muslim leader Elijah Mohammed and the father of Malcolm X. In 1964 the Jamaican government proclaimed Garvey a national hero. His legacy served as an integral force in the “Black is Beautiful” consciousness of the 1960’s. More recently, Garvey has become an inspirational figure within the Jamaican Rastafarian religious movement. Indebted to the perseverance and dedication of Garvey’s Pan-African struggle, Malcolm X wrote, “Each time you see another independent nation on the African continent you know Marcus Garvey is alive.”

Garvey, Marcus

Garvey, Marcus 1887-1940

Marcus Garvey was the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA). He was a prominent spokesman for the “back to Africa” movement within black nationalism, which urged people of African ancestry to return to the continent. He is revered as a prophet in Rastafarianism.

Garvey was born in Jamaica and traveled to London and the United States before World War I (1914-1918). He started the UNIA in Jamaica in 1914 as a fraternal organization calling for self-improvement for poor Jamaicans. As the movement took on a more political character in the 1920s, it gathered support from earlier movements for black liberation in the colony, such as the nineteenth-century ex-slaves reparations movement. Garvey corresponded with Booker T. Washington, who had called for black economic self-sufficiency in his Atlanta Address of 1895, and in the early days of his movement shared Washington’s gradualist approach. When Garvey went to the United States in 1916, his hope was to emulate Booker T. Washington by starting a school in Jamaica to train poor blacks in practical subjects. Once in America, however, he established a branch of the UNIA there, and in the end it was in North America that the movement had its greatest membership and influence in the period after World War I.

The purpose of the UNIA as Garvey expounded it in the period between 1918 and 1922 was to unite blacks around the world and to work for independent economic improvement. He was not a black supremacist, but instead believed that the races would prosper best if they were separate and self-sufficient. Garvey gathered support from veterans of previous black campaigns, especially the movement for pensions for slaves that had been led by Callie House. Garvey provoked controversy when he lent support to President Harding’s campaign against miscegenation and met with leaders of the Ku Klux Klan. His argument was that the races should remain separate, not so that one could dominate another, but so that each could work out its own destiny in keeping with its natural virtues. This is a position that more recent black nationalist groups including the Nation of Islam have also held.

In the 1920s Garveyism became a great international civic movement, whose supporters had an almost religious fervor about Garvey himself as well as his principles. Garvey hoped that blacks from the Americas could redeem Africa. He was opposed to colonialism and called on European powers, especially Britain, to leave Africa. He supported Ethiopian resistance to Italian aggression in 1935, but was harshly critical of Emperor Haile Selassie after Ethiopia’s surrender in 1936 (a fact often overlooked by Rastafarians, for whom Selassie is a divine figure).

In order to put his philosophy of racial self-sufficiency and self-redemption into practice, Garvey founded a number of businesses. Most famous were the Black Star shipping line and the Negro Factories Corporation. Unfortunately, the realities of the business climate in the 1920s, colonial regulations in Africa, and American racial discrimination meant that his businesses were unsuccessful. After the failure of the Black Star Line, the American Department of Justice, spurred on by the new director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, brought charges of fraud against Garvey. The charges hinged on a technicality—whether the Black Star Line had ever owned a ship depicted in the stock prospectus. It is still unclear to this day whether Garvey actually did anything wrong. Nonetheless, there had certainly been a lot of shaky financial deal-making in the company’s history, and Garvey, if not guilty himself of participation, had at least overlooked some misdeeds. In any case, a black nationalist found it difficult to get a fair trial in 1920s America. Garvey was imprisoned for several years, before President Coolidge commuted his sentence. He was deported to Jamaica in 1927.

Garvey had a long dispute with black civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois argued in the early part of the twentieth century that American blacks should work to integrate public institutions and call upon the U.S. government to live up to the high standards of equal treatment under law enshrined in the Constitution. He was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which played a key role in the struggle for racial integration and civil rights for American blacks. Du Bois’s position was, of course, diametrically opposed to Garvey’s. To Garvey, racial integration was at best an illusion and at worst a snare to keep blacks subordinate to whites and away from their destiny in Africa. Their dispute took on an unfortunate personal tone, with Du Bois calling Garvey a “lunatic” and Garvey responding that Du Bois was a “white man’s nigger” and a “mulatto monstrosity.” Ironically, Du Bois later came to a position closer to that of Garvey than to his former integrationist stand, and himself emigrated to Africa, dying a Ghanaian citizen.

After his return to Jamaica, Garvey formed the People’s Political Party (PPP), the first modern political party in Jamaica. Up to this time, Garvey had been reluctant to get involved in politics, seeing the political system as irredeemably white-dominated and participation a form of tokenism that could distract blacks from self-sufficient development. Garvey was elected twice to town council seats, but his views annoyed the colonial government and he was arrested. He finally left Jamaica in 1935 and spent the last five years of his life in London, continuing to work toward his vision of black self-sufficiency and African liberation, but with limited results.

Garvey’s movement, although manifesting itself under a variety of different names and somewhat different ideological colors in its several homes, can be considered the first international African movement and perhaps the most dynamic force in the struggle for democracy, dignity, and human rights for black people of the first half of the twentieth century. Garvey deserves a place alongside better-known figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Toussaint Louverture as a hero in the struggle for black liberation in the Americas.

Garvey’s remains were moved from London to Jamaica in 1964 and were buried in the national heroes’ cemetery in Kingston. He is venerated today as a founding figure in Jamaica’s struggle for national liberation.

Garvey’s own religious practices were conventional— he was a Roman Catholic—and he never claimed any religious authority. However, the Rastafarian movement has adopted him as a major prophet, with many Rastas seeing him as the reincarnation of John the Baptist, Moses, or Elijah. Indeed, the modern Rastafarian movement sprang up after the collapse of the UNIA and the PPP and incorporated many members of those organizations. Garvey’s project of returning blacks to Africa is a centerpiece of most Rastafarian theology. Of course, for Rastafarians, it is a religious duty to return Jah’s people to the promised land, while for Garvey it was a practical necessity.

Marcus Garvey

Marcus Garvey, a black man from the West Indies, was the first to forcefully speak about the concept of African nationalism—of black people returning to Africa, the continent of their forefathers, in order to build a great nation of their own. His writings and ideas would inspire many leaders of the civil rights movement during the second half of the twentieth century.

Early life

Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, on August 17, 1887, the youngest child of a stonemason (one who prepares stones for building). He went to the local elementary school, and at the age of fourteen became an apprentice (working to gain experience) in the printing trade. In 1903 he went to the capital, Kingston, to work as a printer. He soon became involved in public activities and helped form the Printers Union, the first trade union in Jamaica. In 1907 he took part in the unsuccessful printers strike, where organized workers refused to work unless certain demands were met. This experience influenced the young Garvey in both his political and journalistic passions. He soon began publishing a periodical called the Watchman.

In 1910 Garvey began a series of travels that transformed him from an average person concerned about the problems of those with less opportunity, to an African nationalist determined to lift an entire race from bondage. He visited Costa Rica, Panama, and Ecuador, and worked as an editor for several radical newspapers. After briefly returning home, he proceeded to England, where contacts with African nationalists stimulated in him a keen interest in Africa and in black history. In each country he visited, he noted that the black man was in an inferior position, subject to the ever-changing ideals of stronger races. His reading of Booker T. Washington's (1856–1915) "Up from Slavery" at this time had a great effect upon him. Also at this time Garvey met Duse Mohammed Ali, a Sudanese-Egyptian and strong supporter of African self-rule. Garvey began writing for Ali's small magazines and was introduced to other black activists.

On his return to Jamaica in 1914 from England, Garvey formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). These organizations were intended "to work for the general uplift of the Negro peoples of the world," and would become the centerpiece for his life's work.

Message in America

In 1916 Garvey went to the United States to raise funds to carry on the work of his Jamaican organizations. He was immediately caught up in the unrest of the times, and his voice thundered in the evenings on the streets of Harlem in New York City, New York. A New York branch of the UNIA was established, soon followed by branches in
other cities in the United States, in Central and South America, and in the Caribbean. The expansion of the UNIA was publicized by its official voice, Negro World, a newspaper published in English, Spanish, and French. Published in New York City from 1918 to 1933, the magazine was succeeded by the monthly Black Man, which ran through the 1930s, published after 1934 in London.

Negro World reached out to black communities all over the world. It even penetrated into the interior of Africa, even though the white rulers there had banned it. Garvey stressed the need for blacks to return to Africa for the building of a great nation, but he realized that until this was accomplished, Africans needed to make themselves economically independent wherever they lived. He encouraged black people to start their own businesses—to take the business of their ghettos into their own hands.

Together with the American clergyman Archbishop George A. McGuire (1866–1934), Garvey formed the African Orthodox Church. This was in accordance with one of his basic principles, for he believed that each race must see God through its own racial eyes. The Black Christ and the Black Madonna were officially announced at the UNIA convention of 1924.

The movement stumbles

The Black Star Line shipping company and the Negro Factories Corporation were to be the commercial strengths of the Garvey movement. But it was the failure of the shipping venture that gave Garvey's enemies the opportunity to destroy him. Investments in the shipping line were lost, and in 1925 Garvey was imprisoned in the United States. After serving two years and ten months of a five-year sentence, he was deported, or forced out of the country, to Jamaica.

Previously, his plans for colonization in Liberia had been ruined by the colonial powers that brought pressure to bear on the Liberian government. As a result, the land that had been granted to the Garvey organization for the settlement of overseas Africans was given to the white American industrialist Harvey Firestone (1863–1938). And the expensive equipment shipped to Liberia for the use of Garvey's colonists was seized.

In Jamaica, Garvey attempted to enter local politics, but restrictions at the time did
not allow the vote to the black masses. He went to England and continued his work of social protest and his call for the liberation (freeing) of Africa. He died in London on June 10, 1940. Marcus Garvey was married twice. His second wife, Amy Jacques, whom he married in 1922, bore him two sons.

Garvey's legacy

The Garvey movement was the greatest international movement of African peoples in modern times. At its peak, from 1922 to 1924, the movement counted more than eight million followers. The youngest members of the movement were taken in at five years of age and, as they grew older, they graduated to the sections for older children.

Garvey emphasized the belief in the One God, the God of Africa, who should be visualized through black eyes. He preached to black people to become familiar with their ancient history and their rich cultural heritage. He called for pride in the black race—for example, he made black dolls for black children. His was the first voice to clearly demand black power. It was he who said, "A race without authority and power is a race without respect."

In emphasizing the need to have separate black institutions under black leadership, Garvey anticipated the mood and thinking of the future black nationalists by nearly fifty years. He died, as he lived, an unbending leader of African nationalism. The symbols which he made famous, the black star of Africa and the red, black, and green flag of African liberation, continued to inspire younger generations of African nationalists.

For More Information

Cronon, E. David. Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955.

Lewis, Rupert, and Maureen Warner-Lewis. Garvey: Africa, Europe, the Americas. Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1986.

Garvey, Marcus

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.

Copyright The Columbia University Press

Marcus Garvey, 1887–1940, American proponent of black nationalism, b. Jamaica. At the age of 14, Garvey went to work as a printer's apprentice. After leading (1907) an unsuccessful printers' strike in Jamaica, he edited several newspapers in Costa Rica and Panama. During a period in London he took law classes and became interested in African history and black nationalism. His concern for the problems of blacks led him to found (1914) the Universal Negro Improvement Association and in 1916 he moved to New York City and opened a branch in Harlem. The UNIA was an organization designed
"to promote the spirit of race pride."
Broadly, its goals were to foster worldwide unity among all blacks and to establish the greatness of the African heritage. The organization quickly spread in black communities throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and Central America, and soon had thousands of members.

Garvey addressed himself to the lowest classes of blacks and rejected any notion of integration. Convinced that blacks could not secure their rights in countries where they were a minority race, he urged a
"back to Africa"
movement. In Africa, he said, an autonomous black state could be established, possessing its own culture and civilization, free from the domination of whites. Garvey was the most influential black leader of the early 1920s. His brilliant oratory and his newspaper, Negro World, brought him millions of followers. His importance declined, however, when his misuse of funds intended to establish a steamship company that would serve members of the African diaspora, the Black Star Line, resulted in a mail fraud conviction. He entered jail in 1925 and was deported to Jamaica two years later. From this time on his influence decreased, and he died in relative obscurity.

Garvey, Marcus

Garvey, Marcus (1887–1940) US black nationalist leader, b. Jamaica. In 1914, he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey believed that black people could not achieve equality within white-dominated, Western countries. He created a ‘back-to-Africa’ movement, establishing the Black Star Line shipping company as a means of transport. By the 1920s, Garvey was the most influential US black leader. In 1922, the Black Star Line and the UNIA collapsed. Garvey was convicted of fraud and jailed (1925). He was pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge and deported to Jamaica (1927). Rastafarianism is influenced by his philosophy.

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